With a can-do spirit, the Bests made a lot from a little

When Tom Best died last month at the age of 83, he left behind a tightly woven family partnership rooted in a wide variety of enterprises including feed mills, groceries, hardware, farm machinery, farming and even postal services. Those enterprises spanned more than seven decades and four generations and are still going strong with the continued involvement of at least 10 family members.

Few know those ties stronger than Tom’s younger brother, Alfred. The men grew up together, the youngest two of eight children. They slept in the same bedroom together, double-dated girls together, worked in their father’s Nassau mill and general store together, built houses together – side by side – on the north side of Red Mill Pond, and built businesses together. They exemplify the American, can-do spirit that built this country. “I don’t understand people who say they can’t do something,” Alfred told me this week. “How do they know if they ain’t tried?”

Some of that independent spirit may have passed down through the generations from Tom and Alfred’s great-great-great-grandfather William Anson Floyd – “I think that’s the right number of greats,” said Alfred – who signed our nation’s Declaration of Independence for his home state of New York. One of the family’s prized possessions is a November 1777 letter from General George Washington, later the nation’s first president, to Floyd.

Writing from Philadelphia, Washington was seeking Floyd’s help in arranging an exchange of prisoners with his British Revolutionary War opponents to liberate several officers.

Tom was 20 months older than Alfred. “He was born on May 5, 1926; my birthday was easy to remember: 28-2-28, the 28th of February 1928,” said Alfred. When Tom was working the grocery side of their father Tom’s general store and feed mill operation at the corner of Nassau and New roads, Alfred was loading bagged feed on trucks and carrying them around the countryside to farming operations. “I was only 14 and didn’t have my driver’s license but I was out there anyway. I got my driver’s license on my 16th birthday – took the test in a truck – and then my chauffeur’s license on the day I turned 18.”

The Best boys learned early to do a lot with a little. After moving from Pennsylvania and working a rented farm in the Lincoln area, the family moved to Lewes where the father worked for a Lewes feed mill operation. The senior Best learned the milling business and then moved the family to Milford to strike out on his own. He bought property on Shawnee Road and set about building a new grain mill with lumber from a wood lot on the Lincoln farm that the family eventually acquired, and still owns.

The night before the new mill was to open, fire struck. “It was set,” said Alfred, “but my father couldn’t prove who did it. He had no insurance and it left him penniless.”

The family moved south again and settled in Nassau. It was the depths of the Depression and a local bank, Sussex Trust, allowed the family to move onto a property left vacant following a foreclosure. “My father always had a soft spot for Sussex Trust after that,” remembers Alfred, “and eventually became a director of the bank.”

With little to work with other than determination and a willingness to take risks, the senior Best and his boys built a milling operation on the property that eventually spilled across the road and evolved into a general store.

“My father had the Nassau post office there for a number of years. Lewes post office didn’t like it because he would stay open until 9 and help people with stamps and packages and they thought he was stealing business.”

The Bests used their business sense to acquire more property on New Road, a farm at the head of Rehoboth Bay, and, in the 1940s, added New Idea and Massey Ferguson farm machinery to their enterprises. During this time, Tom and Alfred were attending school in Lewes. “I introduced Tom to his future wife, Hilda,” said Alfred.

“She was secretary of our class and I was president. Soon after that Tom was drafted into the Army – out of the 11th grade and into World War II. When his class graduated from Lewes High School, Tom was in the Philippines.”

When he came back from the service, the family enterprises continued to grow. “One day we went to Georgetown for an auction on the courthouse steps,” said Alfred. “The state was auctioning property made surplus by the consolidation of white and colored schools. We decided we wanted the property at Five Points where the Belltown school was located. Five or six acres.

“The bank said they would back us up to $10,000. Tom and I went and I was doing the bidding and took it up to $14,500. That’s when the bidding stopped. Afterwards a man bidding against us said: ‘Boys, how far up would you have taken it?’ I told him, ‘That’s something you’ll never know.’ Fortunately the bank backed us.” The property between Route 1 and Route 9 is still home to Best Ace Hardware.

Plans to move the farm machinery operation to that property changed quickly when the dualization of Route 14 – to become Route 1 – went around Nassau and robbed the general store of the traffic so important to its success.

“It was then we decided to move the general store to the Five Points location, for better exposure.

“The bridge-tunnel had just opened in Virginia and that put an Acme store in Cape Charles out of business because it took away all the town’s ferry traffic. [Delaware eventually bought the Cape Charles ferries to start the Cape May to Lewes Ferry system in the early 1960s.] I went down there five times and brought back truckloads of shelving, refrigerated cases and signage for our new store. We worked all hours of the night putting it all back together and eventually moved the store from Nassau. Later we bought the land where Best Equipment Co. is now from the Norwood family.”

“One day,” said Alfred, “a man from the state told us we were going to have to put curbing up along our property, along Route 1, and said we would have to pay for it.

“We told him the only way we could pay for it would be put up a tollgate on the fourth of July and charge a quarter to every car that came down the southbound lanes. He asked us what we were talking about. We showed him that the state had built its lanes on part of the land they sold us. That ended that discussion,” said Alfred. “That’s why there was no curbing there for so long.”

The brothers gravitated to the business sectors they had started in so long ago – Tom in the general store and Alfred on the farm side – while operating amicably under the corporate umbrella of Tom Best and Sons. “We never had words that I can remember,” said Alfred.

“We bought land together along Red Mill Pond, built the road there together, built our houses as neighbors and raised our families together.” Best Lane continues as an enclave of homes owned by members of the family.

Now the last of his generation in the Best family, Alfred feels like one of the pieces of farm machinery he has kept running through the years. He has two artificial knees, a rod in one arm and has had heart work a number of times.

It’s no surprise that on a recent trip to the bone doctor he asked whether he could be rigged up with a grease fitting for his knees.

When we finished talking this week, by the wood stove at Best Equipment, Alfred, now 81, said the best wisdom his father taught him and Tom was the value of hard work.

With that, he turned and walked off toward the back shop. “I have to go bag some corn to keep on the sales floor. We raise it here on the property. I handpicked a bunch of it this fall to sell for squirrel food.”